Quote:
Originally Posted by Harmon
As for the writing in the Potter books, it's just not very good. I think you could make an argument for her ability to construct a narrative flow, which is no small thing, but her vocabulary is small (a good thesaurus would have helped her a bit,) and her range is narrow. She repeats herself a lot when she describes things. I think the books suffer from being written down to her intended audience - early teens. Too bad she didn't have more respect for their ability to rise to a challenge. But OTOH, perhaps she knew exactly what she was doing - hard to argue with her overall success.
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While I can see your point that cutting down on the repetition in her description and increasing the vocabulary she used might have improved the Harry Potter books on one level; it would also have rendered them less suitable for their intended audience, and that wouldn't have been a good thing from JKR's perspective. Even though I'm sure some of her readership could have risen to the challenge, I'm equally sure that others either couldn't or wouldn't have risen, and those were the ones she needed to keep. It's relatively easy to sell books to people who already read a lot, not so much to those who don't. Her success came from selling books to people and families who didn't normally buy books or read much.
Writing to your audience is not a sign of lack of skill.